Rare Tlingit War Helmet Discovered at Springfield Science Museum

The mystery began to unfold when Museum staffers began to select
objects from the over 200,000 items in the Museum’s collections for a
new display titled “People of the Northwest Coast.” Dr. Ellen Savulis,
the Science Museum’s Curator of Anthropology, was intrigued by one of
the items described in collections records as simply an “Aleutian hat.”
The object was relatively large, ornately carved, and made from a
single piece of dense wood. Although Dr. Savulis’ main area of expertise
is Northeastern United States archaeology, she had the foresight to
question whether hats made by the Unangax, the inhabitants of the
Aleutian Islands, were typically made from such dense wood. Upon further
investigation, Dr. Savulis found that the only type of wooden hat made
in the treeless Aleutians is the hunting hat or visor, made from a thin
plank of driftwood bent into a lopsided cone. None of this information
matched the object she had in front of her....